Position of the Stars
by daisysyins
Summary: In the final year of her life, Clara decides to go back to teach at Coal Hill. But things take an unexpected turn when a few of her pupils get curious about their teacher and decide to see if she really does live in a junkyard... Post Hell Bent canon-compliant.
1. Prologue

_A TARDIS, The Vortex, Undefined Date_

Clara's eyes blazed like black fire as she strode down the round white corridor, throwing glances over her shoulder half to check there was no one following her and half to convey her irritation towards anyone who might be. Well, she said 'anyone'. Really there was only one person who could be. And that was one person she did _not _want to talk to right now.

"Clara!" Her pace quickened at the sound of her name. "Clara, please, can you just _listen_ to me!"

"No, I can't! I bloody well can't!" Clara shot back, without turning round or pausing in her step. "_Ashildr_," she added as an afterthought, just for an extra sting. Normally, the two of them went to extraordinary lengths to avoid the usage of Me's long-ago name; she hated to be reminded of all the days that had been reduced to faded ink on curling pages, brown with age, the ghost of a whisper; but today Clara was so angry she refused to even try and care, determinedly ignoring the soft murmur in the back of her mind telling her this was unfair. All she wanted to do was strike where she knew it would hit home.

After all, she reasoned, how are you supposed to feel when your best friend of who-knows-how-many years won't stop telling you you should run like the wind to catch up with your death?

If the use of her name had had the effect Clara had anticipated, Me did admirably to keep her poker face unsullied, instead assuming the look of quiet, martyred worry that Clara had come to despise. "But the timelines-" she started.

"The timelines are _fine_!" snapped Clara, swinging round at last and glaring. "It's you, with your paranoid little habit – no, sorry, _obsession_ – of logging every little dip and twitch and moan, that nobody else would even bother about, who isn't! You want to send me to my _death_, to stand up in front of that raven and scream, because of a tiny bloody flick or two! Go on, Clara! Run, hurry up! Might not make it in time, you wouldn't want to miss it, it's not like we've got a- a time machine, or anything…"

She stopped when her voice began to crack. _Let me be brave_, she pleaded. _Oh, let me be brave._ As she closed her eyelids against the tears prickling behind them, she wondered how long she'd lived by those words for. _Not long enough_, something inside her couldn't help whispering.

"Clara," Me murmured, her tone coloured grey with the desperation that dominated so many of their conversations nowadays. "Clara, you know what it means. You know why this has to happen. And you know…" She broke off delicately, but they both knew exactly what she'd been about to say. _And you know you can't outrun it._

Clara sighed, a long, resigned sigh, and sank against one of the softly humming white walls. Of course she knew what it meant. Of course she did. It had been a very long time since she'd thought about anything else. For a while now, the timelines Me monitored had begun to show 'scars' – tiny tears in the fabric of the space and time they covered. At first, they'd tried not to think the worst. These did just occur sometimes, Me had reassured Clara. It didn't necessarily _mean _anything. In doses as small as they'd been in then, the scars weren't even harmful. Nothing to lose sleep over, she'd said. But the numbers had steadily climbed, until recently they had reached what Me deemed 'a dangerous level'. And Clara had done her best to keep a pair of determinedly deaf ears for all this to fall on, dismissing it as ridiculous and unreasonable and an utter waste of time to pay attention to; because she knew exactly what it meant.

Her time was up.

She turned her face away as she felt the first tear trail hotly down her cheek. _Oh, for God's sake. Let me be brave._

"I thought you weren't scared," Me said softly.

Clara closed her eyes and tried to breathe. In, out. In, out. In, out. _Brave. Brave. Be brave._

"Of course I'm not scared."

Me waited, cocking her eyebrow, coolly confident she knew perfectly well what was coming.

"Who said I was scared? I have never been scared, not ever, not of that. But I'm dying for God's sake, I'm dying, I'm going to die. I'm never going to think again, or- or talk, or run, or laugh, or dance. I won't even _know _what I'm not doing. There won't be an 'I' to know it! There won't be anything! My story will be over, all the stories, all of them, for me. For ever. And I have to _do _that, I have to put myself in there. And I don't think I can. And I try and I try to be brave, I always try to be brave, but-" Clara broke off and swallowed, trying to choke down the lump rising in her throat, then jutted her chin up and wiped her streaming eyes defiantly, looking straight at Me with at gaze that could have seared through stone. "Yeah, of course I'm scared. I'm bloody terrified."

Me jerked her head in a gesture that could have been a nod, the fulfilment of her expectation, but could have been a simple expression of sympathy. "I know. Believe me, Clara, I know, I do. According to my diaries, I spent the first hundred years or so after you came to the village eating, sleeping and breathing the wait for death. It was the twelfth century AD, and the human race were dropping like flies. Every day I thought it would be my turn, and every day I wondered why it was always theirs." There was such a note of pain in her voice that Clara couldn't help wondering whether her memory was really as finite as she claimed.

Then she looked up at Clara, her eyes as blankly, perfectly dead as usual, the ghost of a smile playing faintly on her lips. "Anyway. It's not over yet, Clara, not quite. Your time isn't up. There's still… some of the story left for you to tell."

Her careful pause burned in Clara's mind, leaving one question drumming through her head. She had to ask. She _had _to. She had to _know_. "How long have I got?"

The smile dropped. "I don't-"

Clara's eyes blazed in a sudden glare. "Yes, you do. You know and you will tell me. I don't care what the answer is, I don't care how little time I have, so long as you _tell me. How long_?"

Me breathed slowly. "About…" Her eyes fluttered shut in concentration, hands moving in miniscule motions as if manipulating the timelines themselves, lips pursing as she worked. Clara winced. How long could that mean? A day? An hour? _Let me be brave. Let me be brave. Let me be brave._

"A year." Clara jumped as Me spoke into the silence. She sounded almost surprised. "A year, Clara. You've got a whole year."

"A year's not that long," she couldn't help commenting.

Me's smile was back. "Don't be pessimistic. You've just found out you're not going to die." Then, with such painful causticity, "What more joyous occasion could there be?"

Clara looked her straight in the eyes – unfathomable still even after all this time – wondering if she dared say out loud the words hanging so heavily in the air between them; the words she whispered to herself in the depths of the night when the world couldn't seem to let her be brave; the words that had played the tune to the very first time the Rotor had groaned up and down under their hands. Yes, she decided, she had to. "Everyone's going to die."

A hitch in the breath. A tense of the shoulders. Then, "Everyone's going to die, yes. Everybody's raven is out there somewhere. But, Clara, here's the thing. I have been alive for more centuries than you can imagine. Not around, alive. There is a bigger difference than you probably realise. And this is what I have learnt.

"If you want to live, for any length of time at all, you cannot think like that. You can't. It is tantamount to never having been gifted life in the first place if you throw it all away on your death. You don't live life waiting to die, Clara; you live life waiting to see what you can do with it."

She paused, maybe to survey the effect of her words, maybe just to catch her breath, before delivering what she surely knew full well to be her ace.

"After all, what do you think the Doctor did?"

"The beginning," Clara said suddenly, before she could catch herself. For a moment, Me seemed actually thrown.

"I'm sorry?"

"I've got a year. You asked me what I wanted to do with it." She shrugged, all traces of despair rinsed from her face. "I want to go back to the beginning."

"Hmm. A nice thought, but I'm not sure Blackpool Victoria Hospital is accepting midwives this late in the season."

Clara bounced to her feet, eyes alight with excitement, smiling, properly smiling, for what felt like the first time in a very long time. "I'm not sure I said it was mine."

_Foreman's Yard, 76 Totters Lane, Shoreditch, London, November 23__rd__ 2026_

For what felt like the first time in a very long time, the wheezing and grinding of ancient engines announced the arrival of something long-remembered.

**A/N - This prologue is very different from the rest of it, in terms of tone, theme, content, etc. It's just a lead-in really. But I loved writing Clara and Ashildr/Me, and I think it's gone OK, but bear in mind this is my first ever fic so I don't have a whole lot to draw on lol. Cheers if you're reading this, by the way, because it means you made it to the end :) Also, I know how unlikely it sounds, but Blackpool Victoria Hospital is genuinely a real hospital and not just an amalgam of Jenna Coleman's hometown and regal role.**


	2. Chapter 1

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away…

No. It wasn't a fairytale. It wasn't a myth, or a legend, or the romancing of an origin; not a garish Punch and Judy, or a lurid Commedia dell'Arte (though Beatrice would have made an excellent Signora). There weren't woods, or wolves, or castles, or dragons – even if she _was _a witch –, no mothers or maidens or crones. Just us.

It was a story, though, because everything is. And it began where it ended; it fell where it stood. A thousand skies ago, in a place called London.

Once upon a time, at Coal Hill…

_Monday November 15__th__, 2027_

… a wicked wind tore through the trees, splaying my long hair out across my eyes like black weeds waving in the water. I didn't attempt to tame it. Instead, I stood up taller, pushing out my chest and lengthening my strides, conjuring the air beside me into a gnarled wooden broomstick like the illustrations in my copy of _Macbeth_. I'd be a witch today, I decided. That would be the safest. Even the heroes in my books got scared sometimes, but the witches never were.

I wished I was a witch. My chest clenched painfully as the school loomed closer and closer, dull grey like a Gothic castle, fading like dust on the wind into the heavy-hanging clouds. It was awful weather, dark and bitter and silent, with driving, freezing rain that I had to shake from my hair like a dog when I edged through the gates; a storm waiting to happen. I tried not to think about the pathetic fallacy.

Despite this, though, I wasn't cold. My heart hammered and hot blood ran through my veins, scalding my cheeks, the sweat on my back prickling in the heavy black witch coat I wore for courage. It didn't seem to be working.

_Brave, Amy_, I tried to think. _Brave. Be a witch, and be brave brave brave._

But I was scared scared scared – and when I looked down, though my hand was still clenched in a hard white fist, the knuckles ivory from a painstaking grip, the broom they'd been holding had disappeared without a trace.

* * *

The world, for me, had always been consistent in one aspect at least: it was never anything like how I imagined it. The former seemed mostly content with keeping my life simple, and harmless, and benign; whereas my mind wanted to jump right to the very worst things possible. It whispered to me, bargaining, blackmailing, stoking the flames; teasing out the terror and then taunting my cowardice. Every bitterly black night, the moon looking malevolently on and the sun wondering whether it would ever be time enough for it to rise, no matter what I told myself, I'd never quite be able to believe I would wake again in the morning. The scenes playing themselves out in my mind's eye, the blackness and the doom, the death I was so scared of, they were too clear, too plausible.

It was the same with the classroom. I'd imagined it even worse than my old one, a great Roman arena of a room filled with children who stared and catcalled and who somehow knew all about me. The form teacher was sadistic and sarcastic and screamed at my stupidity, plucking out the word which still rang like a gunshot in my head and mocking me endlessly while I trembled into a terrified heap on the floor, unable to speak a word.

It was nothing like that. For a start, there was hardly anyone in there, just a few stragglers scribbling notes and flicking through their phones while the form teacher glanced over his PowerPoints – a form teacher who was, I have to say, probably more or less the antithesis of my imaginings. He was round and Scouse and nodded at me kindly as he indicated a seat. I drew in my breath as I took in the girl next to it, pulling my witch coat tight around me like an armour – but she didn't look malicious. She had wide brown eyes and very red hair that curled like the perms in my grandmother's photo album, and big white teeth that glinted when she grinned. She was grinning at me.

"Hi!" she said – and I grinned too as I heard the Scottish lilt in her voice leap out at me, just like _Macbeth_. I liked her already, I decided. "You're Amy, yeah? Now, you don't probably realise this seeing as you only got here, what, five minutes ago, but this is the second-best form in the whole school. Well, third-best if you count the fact that 9D have theirs in the library right now because the Science wing's being rebuilt, but second-best really."

I opened my mouth to reply, but shut it quickly as a sudden terrible thought floated through my mind. She wouldn't know about my _Macbeth _thing. What if she thought I'd been _laughing_ at her accent? What if she thought _I _was the malicious one? I didn't want to make an enemy before I'd even spoken a word.

But, as ever, the world and my mind insisted on differing. She wasn't even looking at me, her eyes on our form teacher as he shook his head and tutted in faux irritation.

"_Second-best?_ _Second_, Carlotta? I can't think of a single other form with a teacher as humorous and benevolent and easy on the eyes as yours truly!" He pretended to look startled as the few present members of the class began to laugh. "What are you all sniggering away for? Look, see what you've started! You're going to have to enlighten us now. Unload a little of that Invernessian wisdom, go on!"

Carlotta just went off in a fit of giggles, her shoulders shaking. I would have did (no, don't say that, Amy, don't even say that) but she didn't seem at all embarrassed. Neither did the pretty Latina girl perched on the desk in front, swinging her long legs and scuffing the toes of her black trainers absent-mindedly as she called out,

"How's she supposed to do that, sir, without risking the staffroom equivalent of a cock-fight after school? I mean, I wouldn't want you to get hurt or anything, sir."

He flapped at her with his big red hands. "Beatrice, while I'm grateful for your concern, I'd also like to remind you that the last time I checked, you were not a host on the Coal Hill equivalent of _Question Time_. The last time I checked, you were also not in this form. Miss Satterly's your tutor, isn't she?"

"Who wants to know, sir?"

"Well, all I'm saying is if I were you, I'd hot-foot it to that classroom before it ticks over to half past. I've heard she's not exactly lenient with latecomers." He paused, pulling a comically agonised face. "A fact I think you probably know better than anyone."

Beatrice rolled her eyes as the increasing population of the classroom began to 'oooh' at her, but leapt off the desk obediently, landing perfectly balanced on the tips of her trainers, before strutting out with a grace and confidence that reminded me of the queens in my book of fairytales. My gaze must have lingered, because she caught my eye through the glass of the classroom door, laughing. I tensed, hoping I hadn't already ruined my chances of liaision with this girl who looked so much like one of my stories come to life - but then she cocked her head silently towards Carlotta and mouthed, _It's amazing, isn't it? Her accent._ I didn't quite dare (no, don't use that word, don't, don't, don't) nod, but I smiled back at her in what I hoped read as agreement. She flashed me one more quick grin, then ducked out of sight once more, dashing down the corridor. I swung back to Carlotta, brimming with questions and for once too interested to worry about how I sounded.

"Does she come in here a lot? Beatrice, I mean?"

If she thought it was an odd question, she did well not to show it. "She's in here most mornings, yeah. Sir pretends he hates it, but honestly I think he quite enjoys her dropping in. The rest of us do, anyway."

"Doesn't she get into trouble?" I couldn't help wondering, thinking how scared I'd be - but then I remembered the way she'd strutted out so coolly. Maybe she didn't get scared – although that seemed a ludicrous notion.

Carlotta shrugged. "I don't know. I probably _should_, seeing as she's my best friend, but it isn't really something she talks about. She's in trouble most of the time anyway." Her face clouded as if she was suddenly anxious, and I had to pull my witch coat tighter than ever around me, but then she looked up at me, and the moment broke. "Anyway, whatever. It doesn't matter. Don't you want to know what the best form is?"

I sucked in my cheeks and swallowed, wondering how on Earth she was managing to avoid the thoughts stinging me like poison. "Yeah. Erm, you mean he won't…" I gestured helplessly towards the teacher. Carlotta burst out laughing, and I cursed myself. _Stupid, stupid, stupid! You should know this!_

"No, of course not! Beatrice was just annoying him, and he was just pretending to be annoyed. We all _know _what the best form is, anyway."

"Oh, I bet I can guess!" a boy from the next table jumped in.

"Well, yeah, well done, Miles, it's not exactly difficult," put in the blonde girl beside to him, rolling her eyes. "It's obvious, right, Carlotta? It's Miss Oswald's. It's _always _Miss Oswald's."

Miles shoved her in the ribs. "Yeah, Scar, I know that. I meant I could get the _name _of the form, right."

"'Course you did, Miles," Scar said, groaning. Then her eyes glinted. "What form _does _she have this year…?"

Carlotta turned away from the suddenly forged anarchy beside us and smiled at me. "Have you got your timetable yet? Can I see who you have for English?"

I laid it on the table wordlessly, not wanting to embarrass myself a second time by admitting the numbers and initials it displayed were meaningless to me. Carlotta ran her finger along and then down the newly printed paper, muttering under her breath in concentration.

"Erm, let's see… EN… Monday, period three… room… one one seven! Yeah, you've got her!"

I stared, completely bewildered.

"Miss Oswald! You've got her for English, we both have!" she said, taking out another incomprehensible timetable and placing it next to mine. "Oh, wow, Amy. I don't s'pose you'll really know how lucky we are this year, so, let me 'unload a little of my Invernessian wisdom' onto you. OK, most of the English teachers here are shit. Then there are a few good ones. Then, there are a couple of _really_ good ones – Mr MacLean is one, actually, he's our form teacher. And _then_, there's Miss Oswald. She's… OK, don't judge me for saying this, it's Beatrice's words not mine, but basically, she's a legend. Half the school would fight like Miles and Scar to get put in her class."

And I think, if I had to narrow it down, that that was the moment things began to change. Because you know how, in stories, premonition is always a thing? How, always, always, no matter what clever device the author tries to use to make it realistic, the main character _just knows_ when something is about to change their life? Well, up until that point, I'd always believed in it, always at least _wondered_; because I'd always believed in stories, too – far more than I'd ever believed in myself.

But afterwards, I knew that it didn't exist – it _couldn't_. Because if it had, I am absolutely certain that I would have been more aware of the fact when I asked what was probably the most important question of my life.

"Who's Miss Oswald?"

* * *

"She's a witch," said Beatrice at breaktime, flinging herself down on the hall floor and baring her teeth like a cat. "And we're all her little familiars," she added in explanation.

"Beatrice!" Carlotta looked a little uncomfortable and more than a little indignant. "Of course she's not a _witch_, don't be stupid. You can't fill Amy up with all this before she's even met her, it's not fair!"

"I didn't say Miss Oswald was a _bad _witch," argued Beatrice. "On the contrary, I think she's a marvellously _good_ one. Glamorous, too. Have you _seen_ that eyeliner! No one non-magical could manage it that smoothly. Although," she added, "I have to say mine isn't _terrible_."

She lunged away, laughing, as Carlotta made to dig her in the chest. "Get _off_, Lotta! What's that for, anyway?"

"You've got to stop _doing _this! Not only is it, firstly, bullshit, and secondly really rude, you'll scare Amy away!"

_Oh, you don't know the half of it._

I almost laughed out loud, catching myself just in time. Scare me away? I'd spent my whole life plucking crab apples and peering after black cats, distracting myself every endless night watching through my window for skirted silhouettes moving across the shell of an egg-white moon. I hugged my witch coat around me now, amazed and amused. Witches didn't _scare _me. Witches kept me _brave_. Even if they were about all that could.

And I'd always wanted to meet a real one.

"Why is she a witch?" I asked them, hoping I sounded just casually interested.

Carlotta groaned. "See, Beatrice! See what you've done! She's _not a witch_."

Beatrice ignored her, squinting thoughtfully out of the rain-soaked window behind us. Utterly, hungrily fascinated, I followed her line of sight, up through the muddy, grassless field and the grey concrete playground, past the gym and the canteen and the art huts, to a classroom on the first floor. It was lit brightly against the dark day, leaving the silhouette of a woman clearly visible at the window. She stood very straight, her chin jutted and her chest raised, dark hair hanging sharply to her shoulders and silky skirts hanging softly to her knees. I thought I knew now where my broomstick had gone. She may not have been gliding it across the silvery midnight moon of my stories – but other than that, she was utterly, impossibly, exactly like the witch I'd always watched for.

I guessed right away who she was.

"Because…" Beatrice's voice snapped through my dream, answering the question I'd almost forgotten asking. "Because her lessons are amazing. Because she shouldn't be allowed to teach them. Because the whole school just adores her and yet no one can quite tell you why. Because of the eyeliner. God, how many reasons do you want?"

"What do you mean, she shouldn't be allowed to teach them? Her lessons are _way_ better than anyone else's!" Carlotta leapt in indignantly.

"That's what I mean! Half the time she doesn't do exam stuff at all! It's like she just teaches whatever she fancies and no one bothers to reprimand her – and yet Mr Jones went absolutely bonkers that one time when Miss Shinney tried to teach us statistics instead of sequences. I'm telling you, Amy, it's highly suspect," she said, turning to me. "All she needs is a pointed black hat, and then I'll be certain."

I listened to her, mesmerised. She didn't need anything, not for me. I was already certain. "What are her lessons about?"

"Everything!" said Carlotta firmly. "Really, they are. Remember at Christmas, Beatrice, when we spent a whole week debating about feminism, and the rest of the year were doing reading comprehensions on _The Giver_? Grace was so jealous!"

"That was incredible," said Beatrice. "And when some twat was stupid enough to ask what on Earth it had to do with the book, she lectured us for half an hour oh how debates were basically verbal essays, then finished it up by saying that actually she thought Lois Lowry was a bit of a shitty author! I never said she wasn't _awesome_. She rides a motorbike, too, can you believe! That's a hell of an upgrade from a broomstick!"

Carlotta sighed, very heavily and very Scottishly. "Bea, for the last time, Miss Oswald is _not_ a witch! Can you stop telling people that? Even if you do listen to Mr Michaels – which, by the way, I know for a fact that you _don't_ \- witches haven't existed since 1727. We aren't living in a fairy tale here!"

Maybe she wasn't. But it was the only way I could cope. Houses crafted themselves into stone castles and thatched cottages, soft green woods hurtling up into great dark forests teeming with wolves and candy houses and little girls in red cloaks. Stories rose for me at each and every turn – and when I thought of the way Beatrice had looked as she'd peered up at the woman in the window, all wide black eyes and reverent face, I wondered whether I might not be alone.

If it was so, I burned at Carlotta's choice of words. But Beatrice just grinned, her expression shunted into submission and the lilt of laughter back in her voice.

"Says the girl who used to spend her days in a gingerbread cottage half a mile from Loch Ness," Beatrice grinned, apparently letting the subject silde. "Anyway, Amy, we've got her in about two minutes! You'll soon see who you agree with!"

She got up to leave, hitching her bag over her shoulder and untangling her long hair from the straps in one admirably fluid motion. Carlotta shook her head.

"_What_?" said Beatrice. "The bell's going to go in a second! I'm not going to risk being late for her English, she might turn me into a frog or a snake or a monkey or something," she called over her shoulder as she strode out of the hall.

"Maybe she doesn't need to," Carlotta murmured drily, rolling her eyes. But Beatrice had already turned the corner.

She took hold of my hand. "Ignore her, Amy," she said. "Beatrice is all right, but she loves winding people up. It isn't even that she doesn't _like _Miss Oswald – like she said, everyone does. But isn't because she's a witch, and Beatrice knows that as well as I do."

I wasn't so sure. For all the joking and jesting, there had been a real note of conviction in Beatrice's voice - as well as that one mad, magnetic moment when I knew we could both have gone off in raptures about the magic of the woman in the window. But from the way she talked, Carlotta had obviously heard it all a thousand times or more, and was exhausted of the subject; so I said instead, "Why is she? So liked, I mean? Is she nice?"

Carlotta paused carefully. "She's amazing."

Outwardly, I frowned, realising that would be the appropriate response – but inside, I beamed. All the stories I loved so much, and needed so much more, seemed to have bled right out of my mind and down into the pages of my life. I couldn't help thinking it was a good job I'd read enough to know all the right questions. Fizzing with excitement, feeling like an actress reading from a script, I asked Carlotta, "Yes, but is she nice?"

"Honestly?" she said. "I'm never quite sure. No, maybe that's not fair. Most of the time, she is nice, she's ever so nice. But… sometimes there's just a moment, when she'll be talking to us, quoting from some poem or other, I don't know, and she'll suddenly look… I don't know, sort of desperate. Like she's…" Carlotta drifted off, her brow furrowing as she struggled to think of the right word. "Like she's terrified." Then she laughed a little shakily. "Listen to me, I'm turning into Beatrice, making all these assumptions! She's not a witch, though, I am sure about that."

I frowned for real. _Terrified? _This wasn't how it was supposed to work. Witches never got scared – never ever. It was the one thing every story agreed on – the one thing I'd carved all my bravery around, whatever little I had. I couldn't lose this, not to anything.

I spoke loudly and clearly, searing the words into the script.

"Of course Miss Oswald's not a witch, then. She can't be. Not if she's –"

"Ssh!" Carlotta hissed, pulling me hurriedly to the other side of the corridor – but not quite hurriedly enough. A small figure had ducked itself out of the classroom opposite while I'd been talking; and now the sharp dark eyes of the woman in the window were firmly fixed on me.

There was no way she couldn't have heard what I'd said – but Miss Oswald made no move whatsoever to indicate her awareness of the fact, just raised her eyebrows in a miniscule motion and said, "Are you coming in, then, or is there a Duke of Edinburgh expedition out here in the corridor I wasn't aware of?"

I could hardly imagine there being much she wasn't aware of; and Carlotta obviously felt the same way. Miss Oswald's tone was light, but she wasn't someone you messed with.

"This is Amy, Miss," she said quickly. "She's new. I was just showing her round. We're not late, are we? We took a bit of a detour."

"You'll do," she said. "I'd hurry up, though. If Mr Jones sees you he'll have a fit." She beckoned us into the classroom. I stumbled dumbly on the scrubby blue carpet, still trying to make sense of all that I'd just taken in. None of it fitted _together_. Everything contradicted everything else. She was a witch, and I _knew _she was a witch; because of the way she looked; because of the way her eyes flitted, so quickly, so sharply; because of the lessons, and the window, and the broomstick; because of Beatrice; because of _everything_. But she wasn't a witch, and I _knew _she wasn't, knew she couldn't be; because I knew she was terrified. Too quick, too sharp. I could read the signs, by now.

Even so, I couldn't quite bear to give up my fairytale.

It was just as well her classroom was so magical. An Aladdin's cave, the bejewelled tower room of an ancient stone castle – a Pandora's box, but for all the wonders. It was painted the same shabby green and cream as the other rooms I'd been in, with the same cheap wooden desks and chipped plastic chairs, but the walls were scarcely visible beneath all the posters and print-outs Blu-tacked to them. There were equipment lists and famous poems and passages from old books like the English classrooms at my old school, but there were also quotes from physicists and planetary diagrams and facts about the stars; pictures of high green mountains and ancient Eastern villages and secret springs like liquid sapphire; history and music and language and stars; a mad mixture of wonder and whimsy and – the word melting like honey over my tongue, just as it always had – witchcraft. She was a witch. She _had _to be.

But what were witches afraid of?

Outside, a raven screamed, flapping its wings and cawing at us as it flew off one of the bare black branches outside the window, up into the wide white sky, and I spotted the last picture; rather incongruously amidst all the others, a photograph of an old blue wooden box stuck just above her desk. It was blurred and grainy, obviously taken by an inexpert hand; and not quite centred on the page either, snapped at an odd angle with sprays of leaves visible here and there at the edge. It almost looked as though the photographer had been hiding.

I stared, interested, as I made my way towards the seat she had gestured to – and the face of a white-haired, frowning man, half-visible behind one of the painted doors, seemed to look just as hard back at me. If Miss Oswald was a witch, this man was undoubtably a magician. Where her eyes were black and sharp as a starless night, his were icy blue – but they were the same too, human beyond humanity, quick and ancient and missing nothing at all. I wondered whether he'd seen the photographer after all – and whether they'd ever realised.

Life and Time, was the title written in careful black capitals on the smudged whiteboard just above his head.


	3. Chapter 2

**A/N – This chapter took forever, and I'm so sorry. But I quite like it, I think, and I had an amazing time writing from Clara's perspective. Hope you enjoy :) **

* * *

_Thud. Thud. Thud._

I clamped my hands across my chest, hardly daring to breathe, cursing the adrenaline hammering my heart. I'd never known it could beat so loud – but then I didn't think I'd ever been so alert, every sound deafening, every vision sharply crystalline. _Focus. Focus._ I kept my eyes on the black velvet sky hanging heavily above me, watching the white of my breath sharpen and fade as it burned like ice in my lungs. _Not long now. Not long. I promise._

_And somewhere_, I told myself, the stars blurring like scattered snow through my watery eyes, _somewhere out in that sky, this is all over._

* * *

Walking back to the junkyard that evening, Clara really didn't know why she'd taught what she had. It wasn't as if she'd been planning to – in fact, she'd had a whole piece on _Romeo and Juliet_ worked out for Year Nine, complete with slideshow. And, even after all these years, she still loved teaching Shakespeare (though admittedly not as much as Austen; she was, Clara ruminated, as skilled an author as she was… other things-er) so she couldn't even excuse it like that to herself. No, today it had come completely out of left-field, her mouth lying fluently as her mind had reeled in as much astonishment as the children. Clara did teach these types of lessons sometimes, she couldn't help herself, but so far she'd taken care to do so just once or twice a term. This class hadn't been due theirs for another fortnight. She wouldn't have taught one like this anyway, not since the feminism debates she'd led at Christmas had attracted so much more of a buzz than she'd wanted. When Clara had first stipulated doing this, Me's one and only term had been, 'no incongruous prominence'. And although even after three thousand years together, she still had no idea why Me insisted on using the longest words possible, her meaning had been clear. Clara shouldn't- wouldn't- _couldn't_\- Make A Name For Herself.

Unfortunately, however, she didn't think the result of what she'd done today could possibly be anything else.

It had begun ordinarily enough. She'd strode in on her trademark black heels (which she wore, as she reminded Me every morning, because they were twenty-fifth century Parisian, extremely comfortable and very highly fashionable, and _not _because otherwise she'd be stuck at the chin height of most of Year Ten and Eleven), her chest raised and her shoulders thrown back in the façade of confidence that had become almost as natural as breathing in the last ten months. (Although that was a purely figurative expression for her, wasn't it?) She'd taken her usual one glance at the photo of the Doctor she had stuck above her desk – the _only _photo she had, the only glance at it she allowed herself. Once a day. She didn't miss him if she looked at it just once a day.

Clara hadn't even been thinking about him, anyway. The glance was habit, surely, nothing more.

In fact, now she mused on it, there were lots of things she hadn't been thinking about. The raven, for a start. Gallifrey. Trap Street. Their TARDIS, _Me's _TARDIS, gapingly, glaringly empty. Dying.

Yes, she hadn't been thinking about _dying_. She hadn't been heaving great breaths, trying to remember the rejoicement of her lungs at the air, the gentle thump of her heart, the wonderful lightness of her shoulders without the ache of their raven-shaped anchor weighing her to the ground. She hadn't been wondering, madly, whether _that _might have been why she was still only five foot one; maybe if she was unpaused, and living, and breathing, she'd be well over five foot five by now. She hadn't been thinking about any of that, of course, because she never did. Never, ever, ever, Clara promised herself – although it was becoming more and more of a struggle to believe it.

Still, it had been normal at least at that point. Utterly normal, _boringly _normal. Them chattering, her sighing, Beatrice or Zac making some crass remark or other – business as usual, and wonderfully so; until she'd opened her mouth.

Clara had, she reckoned, always been a bit of a borderline case for foot-in-mouth syndrome, but, really, this had taken it to a new level of spontaneous.

"Right!" she'd said, pacing up and down the shabby carpeting in what was simply a restless attempt at exercise, and most definitely _not _a way to try and recall how it felt to wear out her limbs, "I hope your October so far has been successful and productive – note how I do _not _say 'fun', Zac," she'd pointed out to a particularly audacious student, who the week before had shouted down her 'incorrect' usage of the word, "- as I'm sure our lesson today is going to be. Soraya, thank you for the thought – my Lord, I bet you're the light of your mum's life – but you can, actually, put the books back, seeing as we're not going to need them. I have… something else lined up for you today."

That was when the gasps had sounded, Clara just barely suppressing her own. _Romeo and Juliet, you daft woman! _she'd chastised herself. _My God, that's a bit of a mispronunciation!_

She hadn't really been _worried_, though. Slips of the tongue like this were probably just a symptom of the ageing; when all was said and done, she _was _getting on for three thousand and six. No, what had _worried _her was when the lies had kept on coming, melting off her tongue one by one, thick and fast as a snowstorm and at least three times as obstructive. Her carefully planned lesson on the effects of toxic masculinity on the feud's longevity – very nice and normal, she'd thought – had soon lain buried beneath them like grass under winter's whiteness, thrust to one side like a memory you wished you could erase. (And she'd had her chance, actually, hadn't she?) Out, instead, had come something very different; and maybe that might have been where it had started to rear off track.

Without knowing quite what she was doing, but gripping the black marker like a lifeline, Clara had stretched as far up the whiteboard as she could reach, and had begun to write. The room had spun around her, the floor tilting and swaying in great waves, her frozen heart lurching in a way usually reserved for the rockiest of their take-offs (and she meant hers and Me's, she definitely meant hers and Me's), but her hand had been steady, careful black letters settling into careful black words that she seemed to have no control whatsoever over.

_What are you doing? _she'd asked her hand silently (and hey, Clara thought, at least she hadn't said that out loud). The complete lack of lucidity surrounding every action was something that, having a physicality like her own, she didn't think had happened since the last time she'd got hammered off her tits on hypervodkas in that bar on Ruelta Seven (then woken up the following day beside a _very _suave American by the name of Captain Harkness, but _that _particular incident was most definitely better off left thoroughly alone); and that did worry her.

Then she'd stepped back.

Had she been in possession of a heartbeat, Clara was certain beyond certainty that the realisation of what it was that her hand had been drafting would have stopped it dead in its tracks. And now she thought about it, this was absolutely definitely where her lesson had gone so sickeningly wrong, because those were her words, all they made her think of were the things she couldn't, and what had happened at the end had been like no one but the man in the picture she wasn't allowed to spare another glance towards.

_Tomorrow is promised to no one, but I insist upon my past_, was the phrase that stood out in Clara's bold black printing just above his head.

* * *

She'd talked without stopping, going on and on until her voice changed, fading soft and dreamlike, creeping into every crevice and pooling like candlelight in the corners of the room until it began to sound like the only noise that had ever been there. She hadn't paused. She hadn't been able to. The words had poured out of her, quietly, soothingly rhythmic; balm on a wound; a mother's lullaby.

Her children had just watched, just sat there. No whispering or sniggering or hastily scrawled notes for her to turn a blind eye to. No quick checks of Instagram or scrolls through YouTube or ridiculous animalled selfies on Snapchat; nothing at all, not even from lippy Beatrice. They'd just _listened_, their previous silence record (four minutes seven and a half seconds, by Clara's count – why teaching wasn't an Olympic sport was beyond her) smashed to shards. They had looked, for want of a better word – although perhaps there wasn't one. Wasn't this her job, after all? – hypnotised.

What she'd said had been this.

"Do you know, any of you, do you know what the largest, the widest, the saddest, and undoubtably the most amazing word in this whole large, wide, sad, and incredibly amazing language is? And, no, Zac, no, Beatrice, before either of you ask as we are all fairly sure you will, it is not 'antidisestablishmentarianism' or any of those other frankly quite ridiculous words that I have never heard used either in a serious context or outside the eleven to sixteen demographic – and not even then when it comes to your writing, I've noticed. No, this is a different word. Quite a short one, I suppose, in terms of the number of letters, but – like me! – it more than makes up for the fact in other areas. Such as meaning. I could never, Year Nine, not if I had" – she'd paused to laugh, mirthlessly – "not if I had three thousand years, explain to you the meaning. It's the biggest word in the universe; in fact, some might say it _is_ the universe. It's ancient and always, filling our lives with its ghosts since the beginning of everything. It's wild and mad and daft and impossible, and the most incomprehensible thing ever to exist.

"Time. The word is time."

Clara had written it down, the four small letters that said so little and meant so very much.

"It's bigger than even you'd think. When a moment is over – like this one, like right now – it's not _done_. It doesn't just _go_, slip off into the darkness of memory along with all the others. It's not _gone_. Well – maybe for us.

"It's a bit like how the time zones work, here on Earth. In December, when it's New Year's Eve and you're eating far too many Quality Street and watching the countdown on ITV1 with your drooping eyes when you all, frankly, should be in bed, it's only that moment in _one place_, in this country of grey rain and concrete up here in the dreariest corner of Europe. Down in New Zealand or Australia, it'll already be halfway through the first of January; and across the ocean in Mexico or Miami, they'll hardly have finished their tea. For Canberra, our living moment is just a memory, and for Guadalajara, an anticipation. The time depends on where you are; and it's the same everywhere. Our dead yesterdays are one person's sunny todays and another's hopeful tomorrows. Nothing's _gone_, nothing. Not ever. Every moment is alive somewhere, for someone, in this great big never-ending stew of days that's all around us, all the time. Somewhere there are the days before we lived, and somewhere there are the days after. In them, we are the yesterdays, the memories, the possibilities. We're all ghosts to someone. All of us, right now. It just depends on where you happen to be.

"It all depends on the position of the stars."

There had been a moment of utter, utter quiet, then. Every eye in the room had been fixed on her, burning, searing, every one of them asking questions she knew she couldn't possibly answer.

Clara cringed at the memory. _Why_ hadn't she stopped herself? Why _hadn't _she been able to? She must have _realised_. 9H had never been that silent in their lives – it wasn't as if it hadn't been obvious! But, no, she'd carried on, on and on and on, the whole double lesson, right up until the bell had rung for lunchtime – when surely it had spread through the school like wildfire. _Miss Oswald the witch, casting out her spells, _she thought, remembering the remark outside the classroom. _Yeah, well, maybe I'd like it if I was, Amy. Magic's fun. Magic's easy. If I was magic, I wouldn't have to walk in here every day more terrified than you are._

That was forbidden as well. Clara wasn't _scared_. She mustn't ever, ever tell herself that she was scared.

Although something else had happened then too, something that wasn't supposed to. Something that maybe, as much as she tried to dispel the thought, fitted in quite well with all that.

She'd turned towards the window, desperate to escape the stares, wanting more than anything just to disappear – and trying to choke down the inexplicable lump that had risen up in her throat. Confused, she'd pulled one of her shaking hands to her face – shaking? She didn't shake! – then just looked, shocked, helpless, when her fingers came away streaked with a glistening wetness. Crying, too? What was this? She never cried. She of all people had no right to cry, no reason.

No, Clara had really hadn't had any idea why she'd done that, either.

_Because we're all ghosts to someone_, she thought now. Somewhere out there, to someone – most people - her death was over and done with, another ghost to heap on top of the pile. It was gone, and so was she. It all depended on the position of the stars – apparently. And while Clara knew, far too well, that all these things; sadness, terror; dread; were selfish and ridiculous and unreasonable, and she'd long since convinced herself that her outburst about the timelines had been nothing more than the result of pent-up frustration at Me making itself known at the wrong time of the month, she wondered not for the first time whether perhaps they existed in her anyway.

Clara sighed as she turned on to Totters Lane, rubbing the thin material of her coat between her fingers as she tried to concoct an evasion innocuous enough to keep Me oblivious of her rule-breaking. It was surprisingly tricky. Clara had found that when you'd spent the last three thousand years by someone's side, it tended to become unreasonably difficult to lie to them. She hated this at the best of times – Clara _needed_ her secrets, always had done. As a child, she'd invented countless codes and ciphers to conceal things she wanted hidden, reading with fervour about the usage of others in history. As a teenager, her passwords had been the wonderment of Mr Fernanda the IT teacher, as he'd attempted for the hundredth unsuccessful time to crack the easiest. And during her time with Me, they'd both picked up dozens of languages in order that, wherever they went, they could be certain of uninvaded conversational privacy whenever they wanted (even if their reasons for doing so maybe didn't bear thinking about).

But Me herself could read every nuance of Clara by now with one sweep of those stone-grey eyes, and seemingly all the difficulty of flicking through a picture book. She might as well ink 'I AM LYING' on her forehead for all the good trying to conceal anything from Me would do – and yet Me herself, even after all these years, still remained impenetrable to one and all…

Stepping in through the gate of the junkyard, Clara had fallen so deep into her thoughts that she missed how it swung open too easily, the bolt forced by an inexpert hand. She missed the soft, shallow footprints lying beneath her in the watery mud. She missed the scuffed black boot-tips peeking out from underneath the shadowed container.

She missed, in fact, everything apart from what she couldn't have, her ears pricked and her senses sharpened as they were after so much travelling – the sound of high, panicked breathing echoing out into the starlit November night.


	4. Chapter 3

I was five years old when we moved to London. I don't think I'd ever seen it before that; maybe not even heard the word. It didn't seem to be one of the kingdoms featured in my book of fairytales, though I flipped back and forth scouring the well-thumbed pages for its mention. Even then, I wanted my life to work like a fairy story – small, and safe, and predictable, with everything bad hideous, and everything beautiful good. Somewhere with nothing to be scared of, no unknown left to fear. I would be the hero, in a place like that - I was sure of it. The worthy, and the fearless, and the brave…

When we got to London, the reason for its omission became obvious. It wasn't great and green and glowing like all the pictures in the books I pored over. It was dull and dark and dreary grey, with big buildings that cluttered up the sky. Towers walled me in and huge crowds of people swept me up, whisking me away to places I couldn't control. In the dungeons below, great trains rattled and thundered like merciless bullets; and upstairs, roaring, smirking cars swept screaming through the streets, rushing round corners ready to eat me all up. Everything was huge, and everything was unstoppable.

Of course it wasn't in my book of fairytales. London wasn't small, or safe, or predictable. London was unknown – unfamiliar – London was uncontrollable. I couldn't be the hero, not in a place like that. Not in a place where you could never know what might be lurking in the shadows. Not in place that made you so afraid of your own. Even for me, it was a fairytale too far. My own little taste of the impossible.

I'd come to love witches so much because I knew that was just exactly what they dealt in.

* * *

_Monday November 15__th__, 2027_

I walked out of Miss Oswald's classroom in a daze, the sound of her voice still ringing in my ears. She'd talked all lesson, talked without stopping – talked and talked and talked, for longer than I thought I'd ever heard anybody. No one had interrupted her, though. No one had wanted to. Beatrice was right. Terrified or not, it was as if she'd cast a spell. We'd all stayed silent, hardly daring to breathe. Every word, every sound, every roll of her tongue, had painted the universe for us in the stale classroom air. It had begun to feel as if she really had risen us right up among the stars she talked about. The Earth had faded to just a pinprick of blue in her words – the monsters shrinking to minibeasts, London to a toytown, the shadows into scribbles of pencil. So small, so safe, so predictable. By the time she'd uttered that sentence, that one incredible sentence – _It all depends on the position of the stars _– I hadn't been afraid at all. I hadn't been afraid. For the first time in eight years, the first time since we'd moved to the land of noise and fear, the land of the uncontrollable – _I hadn't been afraid._

It had come back, of course it had. The moment the bell had rung, plunging us all back to Earth with an unwelcome _thump_, all the old sick shaky fear had come running. It always came back for me.

And yet I wondered, as I left the classroom that lunchtime, whether maybe it didn't have to. Not now I'd found a witch to cast me my spell. _Position of the stars_. That was what had made it all shrink. _It all depends on the position of the stars._ Maybe I could cast it for myself. Maybe I could make it all shrink again. And maybe then I really could be the hero.

I just had to find something to test it out on…

* * *

"Well, you picked your day, Amy! God, that was even madder than _usual_," said Beatrice, biting into a segment of her orange as she shook back her long dark hair.

It was lunchtime. She'd taken me off to sit with a brand-new crowd of people, all of us huddled up on the damp concrete steps outside the canteen. I knew without having to be told that this was the 'popular' group; the social structure's ruling elite. Carlotta had ducked herself out of reach the moment she'd grasped where we were being led, rolling her eyes and throwing a half-hearted excuse over her shoulder in Beatrice's direction, but I hadn't known how to refuse. Even bearing in mind the position of the stars, setting out such plain disdain could surely be nothing short of turning myself over to the ogres. They'd call me that word again, that one terrible word, still stinging like a slap… Worse than any monster…

I shook my head, not wanting to think about it; dragging my mind to the scene in front of me instead.

"Miss Oswald's always pretty weird though, ain't she?" one girl was saying, tugging at her dubiously tiny tie with two precariously long nails. "I mean, cool weird, but still _weird_, don't you think? Like, no one else could get away with the stuff she pulls in a million years. Remember that crazy assembly she did last year, with all them random poems?"

"Yeah, you're just pissed because you pronounced 'Bysshe' wrong when she called on you, Ellie," another girl told her, one eyebrow raised wryly as she scrolled through her phone.

"Bryan Kent heard!"

"Bryan Kent _laughed_," said Beatrice crisply, as if that decided the matter. "You're wasting your time on that one, Ellie, don't you think?"

"_I _think Beatrice has just got a kink for witches," commented the boy pressed up next to her. He didn't look too disappointed about the situation. Miss Oswald may have been the witch in residence, but the whole school seemed under Beatrice's spell.

He turned towards her, adopting an air of confidentiality and lowering his voice to a stage whisper. "And I don't mean to rain all over your fantasy, babe, that's totally not what I'm about, but you do know the broom is only there as a _stand-in_, right? Like, to _compensate_?"

"Really?" she shot back, eyebrows raised in perfect black arches. "You're going to be wanting how many of these magical compensating broomsticks, then, James?"

"_You _can set me up with at least three, Beatrice, you still owe me a fiver," James told her, the group rippling with laughter. Beatrice laughed too, her teeth even and pearly white against the rich caramel of her skin. I couldn't help thinking she looked more the fairytale queen than ever, effortlessly, airily confident; always the centre of the crowd, all her subjects straining to crane in around her. It was odd to think now that she was the same person who'd gazed such rapturous eyes through the rain with me that morning.

James paused, his head on one side; looking at her too. I wondered fleetingly if he'd ever seen her like that.

Maybe she wondered too. She flinched in annoyance, sensing his gaze. "What?"

He peered at her again.

"_What?_"

"Bea, I'm not fussy, you know. If you've got that fiver, you can give it me now."

"What do you mean?" she asked him crossly. "Quite apart from anything else, since when have I ever had a fiver to my name? You've been into town with me. I practically have to don a balaclava every time I pass outside the bank."

Ellie and the phone girl snickered, but James was still looking at her. "What's that in your hand, then?"

Beatrice's expression slipped a little – and maybe this morning didn't seem so odd after all. But she kept her voice steady, her eyebrows raised, aloof and acerbic as ever. "God, what _are _you taking in your tea, James? Because it certainly isn't sugar, I'll tell you that for free. There isn't anything in my hand, OK?"

When he failed to adopt an expression that conveyed any kind of conviction, she sighed heavily, irritated, and flipped it out for him to see for himself. "Look, nothing, see? Empty as my bank balance. Where do you get this stuff, the _Daily Mail_?"

I peered too, confused. No… surely…? But then I shook my head, dismissing the thought as quickly as Beatrice. Of course not.

James blinked at her, wounded. "All right, calm down! I asked you a _question_, Beatrice, it wasn't exactly the Spanish Inquisition." He bit his lip. "I don't want you to get into any more trouble, that's all."

"Ah, _sweet_," Beatrice said, rolling her eyes and mocking him. "God, James, do you not trust me to manage my own _life_?"

"Babe, have you met you?"

"And don't _babe _me, you strident misogynist!" A mischievous smile edged its way through her features, raising her eyebrows and kinking the corners of her lips up into a knowing grin. The morning's events seemed impossible again now. She was the queen, unquestionably the ruler and effortlessly the regal. The stuff of my fairytales. "Honestly, did you learn nothing from all those feminism debates?"

"Yeah, well, it's not difficult to be a feminist when Miss Oswald's the woman in front of you," one boy grinned, shuffling up to join in the conversation.

"Zac, ssh! She'll turn you into a frog, don't you know?" someone else warned, following him. And then someone else, and someone else, and someone else…

And there we were again, back on the witch.

It was taken as a fact here that that was what she was. Unspoken. Indisputable. I thought I could see now why Carlotta had ducked herself out so hurriedly. In amongst this crowd, her dismissals would have looked ridiculous. Everyone seemed to have a story, a theory, an anecdote. I listened open-mouthed, astonished at the fairytale unfurling itself for real in front of my eyes. It really _was _a spell. It really _could _change me.

But I shut my mouth quickly when I saw Beatrice watching me, an unreadable expression on her face.

Thankfully, her attention seemed to be in perpetual demand, and she was soon summoned away by yet another of her subjects.

"Beatrice!" a girl across the way was calling, smoothing her spider-like false eyelashes and adding yet another roll to her already improbably short skirt. "You're in her English, you lucky bitch, you'd know. Isn't it a thing that Miss Oswald never, ever gives anyone detention? Like, no matter _what_ you do? 'Cos Jasmine was saying to me the other day that this one time Kevin – you know, in your Drama, that one what got in isolation with you that time, he put all that stuff in the mince in Food Tech – anyway, he tried to–"

Beatrice rolled her eyes, cutting her off. "Yeah, as if she needs to! As if anyone ever dares to stray from her will of iron!" Then her black eyes sparkled. "And even if you were a total twat and _did_, Goldie, she's a _witch_. She wouldn't give you anything so mundane and prosaic as a _detention_. Oh no, she'd drag you back to her lair and simmer you in her cauldron while she sits there marking Year Eleven's mocks. On Macbeth! She teaches chemistry too, you know. She'd do it _well_."

"Or she might wave you off into atoms with one flick of her pen-shaped wand," added James, gesturing dramatically. "She was my sister's physics tutor last term, would you believe!"

"What, she teaches _science_?" the eyelash girl asked, wide-eyed underneath her spiders.

"Oh, Miss Oswald knows _everything_," Beatrice drawled – and for some inexplicable reason, she turned to face me instead, as if the question had been mine. "Honestly, Amy, it's weird. Like we walked in one day the other week, and there was all this maths scrawled up on the whiteboard – all these crazily complicated equations. And Miss Oswald was just stood in front of it, calmly solving them, as if she were bloody _Pythagoras_ or something. It was insane. Then another time it was all this Arabic calligraphy – and then there's been Greek, and Hebrew, and Latin… I mean, no one even _speaks _Latin any more! I bet she only uses it for her spells."

"When was it _Arabic_? I don't remember that," said James, peering at her.

"Oh, I was in detention or something after school," she said quickly. Then she turned back to me. "She speaks loads more languages too, I've heard her. German with the German teachers, French with the French teachers, Spanish with" – here she paused, just for a split second, before recovering herself – "Spanish with the Spanish teachers, even _Persian _with that Iranian kid. It's mad, Amy, honestly. No one understands her at all. She's _got _to be a witch, I'm sureof it." She leaned in closer still. Her eyes were huge and dark, great pools of ink against her caramel-coloured skin, her red lips poised half-open. She looked impossibly beautiful – so perfect it was difficult to believe she was real at all.

"She's got to be," Beatrice repeated, as if it were her own magic spell. "She's got to be a witch, Amy. Don't you think?"

Suddenly I really could believe it had been her leading my gaze across the rain that morning. An almost desperate eagerness clung to her every breath as she waited, sparking her features like a firework. Enraptured.

If I hadn't known better, I would have said almost afraid.

But I did know better. People like Beatrice – the heroes, the ruling elite – they were never afraid. Not ever, not of anything. And certainly not of people like me.

I was sick of being a person like me. I wanted to believe in magic. I wanted to believe she could change me. _I _wanted to be the hero.

I nodded slowly.

"Even so, she'd have a hell of a job boiling you up, Goldie," said Zac suddenly. "Must be freezing there, this time of year."

The girl on her phone glanced up for the first time, bemused. "Freezing _where_? It's _November_, Zac, it's freezing everywhere. And who's boiling Goldie up? What have I missed? What are you _on _about? Am I sat here with a load of nutcases?"

"That's debatable," James murmured, his eyes on Beatrice.

"Well, she lives down that junkyard, doesn't she?" Zac countered, colouring slightly. "Miss Oswald. You know, that old one, down on Totters Lane."

I froze.

Beatrice whipped round so quickly James almost ended up with a mouthful of her long dark hair. He coughed and gagged, miming a comedy choking fit. I don't think she even saw him. "What did you say?"

"Foreman's Yard, that's the one," said Zac, snapping his fingers. "Yeah, have you never heard? I thought you knew everything, Beatrice. Dossier on legs!" He creased up laughing.

"And very fine legs they are too," she told him, eyebrows sky-high. "Heard what?"

"Well, that's where she lives, down in Foreman's Yard." He stopped to glare at the phone girl, who was snorting into her camera at his words. "Eva, stop! It's true, I swear it is. I've seen her there loads of times, just sort of pottering about by this metal container thing. Her motorbike's parked there too, sometimes. It can't be a very _comfortable _lair, I've got to say – all that scrap! But good for cauldrons. And she looks amazing for it, don't you think!"

There was a myriad of groans at his lewdness. I hardly knew what they were for. I hadn't taken in anything since the words 'Foreman's Yard'. Words I'd never wanted to hear again.

Beatrice wasn't listening either. She didn't even seem to have heard what Zac had said. Instead, she leaned in closer, still full of that same, strange urgency. "Foreman's Yard?"

Zac frowned at her. "Yeah? God, Eva, can you stop_ laughing_?" He flapped at the phone girl impatiently, almost catching her in the eye with her own keyboard.

Beatrice took no notice. "Definitely?"

He frowned harder, having fought himself free. "Beatrice, you don't _want_ to get dragged off to her lair, do you?"

She sat back slowly, an odd expression on her face – almost as if she were considering it. James snorted with bemused laughter, shaking his head. "You are so nuts."

Beatrice blinked, seeming to recover herself. Then she smiled. Turning to James, she told him, "James, your determined stating of the obvious becomes horribly tedious for one and all involved after a while – refrain if you can, please." Then, to Zac: "And no, of course not. That's the whole _point_."

"The point of _what_?"

She sighed, as if it should be obvious. "Well, as James so graciously deigned to point out to you all earlier on, I'm in trouble all the time. If I'm going to wind up there some day, I might as well know where I'm going. A reconnaissance scout, if you will."

We all blinked at her. She rolled her eyes. "I'm going to have a scout around Foreman's Yard, yes? Tonight, maybe? What do you think?" She cackled with witchy laughter at our faces, baring her teeth like a cat, the same as that morning in the hall. "Nice and dark!"

I looked at her, struck dumb. This couldn't be happening. Not here. Not now.

Not again.

James raised his eyebrows. "OK, you _are _nuts."

"What did I say about stating the obvious?"

"Well, you are! Bea, you can't go!"

Zac nodded in agreement, his eyes wide. "I wasn't… Beatrice, I wasn't being _serious_. And Eva, you can shut up, by the way, before you start that laughing again. It was just a joke, Bea, it was just like the witch thing. I mean, of course she's not a witch, not really. No one _really _thinks that. I was kidding about with the junkyard thing, I swear – I was just trying to get Eva to stop _laughing_ at me. It's probably just her way to school or something. And I bet it's not even _her _motorbike I've seen, maybe some bloke's got a similar one and can't be arsed to pay for his parking. Beatrice, it's crazy going there, seriously. And in the _dark_! You _can_'_t_!"

She laughed at him. "Oh, well, if you're all too _scared_…"

I should have seen what was coming next.

Beatrice turned to face me, smiling her beautiful, fairytale smile. "Amy," she said. "I bet you're braver than all these jokers. Tell me, would you do me the honour of coming with me tonight? To Foreman's Yard?" She grinned a wicked grin. "In the _dark_?"

I stared at her, my heart thudding. My hands dropped to my sides, stolen broomstick all but forgotten, my witch coat catching the breeze and flying out behind me. Like a cape. The sheens of tiny stars dancing in the corners of my eyes seemed to shift position as I watched, just a little.

I could do it, this time. I could do it, I could dare it, I could be just like everybody else. Just like all the heroes. I could run right in there and dare it, with this fairytale queen of the school. I could think of the position of the stars to stop me ever being afraid, because Miss Oswald was a witch, of course she was, of course she had to be – and then my story could be rewritten. I wouldn't be that word any more after that, still eating me right down to the bone; hard and sharp and ugly. I'd be drafted in as the hero this time, as the worthy and the fearless and the brave, and no one here would ever know the difference…

"No."

Beatrice blinked – and then she laughed, a little shakily. "Oh, it's the wicked stepmother! Everybody hiss!"

"Beatrice, _no_," Carlotta continued, crouched behind her from where she must have crept up. Her eyes were very bright, her cheeks sharp pink, her soft Scottish words spiking and rising as she spoke, sharper and sharper, stumbling over each other in hard staccato bursts of anger. "You can't do this. You can't. I won't let you. I _know_ what you're doing, and you _can't_, OK? This is twisted, this is _evil_. I won't let you drag anyone else into you being mad like this, Beatrice. God knows I shouldn't even let you do it to yourself." She bit her lip, blinking away the glossy brightness from her soft brown eyes. Then she sighed. "_I _will come with you, OK?" she said. "You can bring _me_. I'll go along with whatever it is you want to do; you can talk about witches or whatever to me the whole time, and I won't even try and stop you, I promise. But _you don't do this to Amy._" Her voice was still quiet, but harder, firm, her face set. "You don't do this to anyone, _ever_. Do you understand, Beatrice? Do you hear me?"

The whole group was silent as a stone, every word ringing low and clear. Beatrice must have heard her. Everyone had. Yet she made no move whatsoever to indicate her awareness of the fact; no acknowledgment of the words or their meaning – whatever they did mean, and I didn't know. She didn't even twitch. Her body was fluid as honey as she twisted further towards me. Her beautiful black eyes pierced into mine, and her perfect pearly teeth glinted into a grin.

"Amy, I dare you."

It was the grin of a wolf.

* * *

Long ago, all the way back at the beginning of Year Seven, there had been a game. It had been devised by the social structure's ruling elite, and had existed for a single purpose: it decided your worth, once and for all. The game would write your reputation, dictate your standing – it was the game that elected the heroes.

What choice did I have but to join in?

The rules had been simple. Every lunchtime, crowded in at the end of the field where the rest of the school knew better than to venture, one of the people right at the top – one of the rulers – would take their turn in crafting a challenge for the rest of us. A dare, to prove ourselves worthy. Anything at all, so long as it made us scared enough.

The Dare Game had lasted three weeks; Monday to Friday. Fifteen days to prove ourselves. For fourteen days, I struggled through. I climbed trees, picked nettles, knocked on doors – desperate to begin my blank slate with a different story. By the fifteenth day, I had almost dared to relax. I was used to the fear; used to pushing myself through it. Maybe it wasn't so difficult – maybe it had never been so difficult. Maybe all I had to do was tell it like a story, and then it would become one. Small, and safe, and predictable. Maybe I even started to believe it.

With the fifteenth day's dare, the plot twisted.

Of course being the hero could never be that easy.

Until then, the dares had always taken place at lunchtime – in the field, in full daylight. Occasionally we'd ventured up towards the distant school buildings, but not often. The dares had their place, and we had ours, the game's rulers had loftily assured us.

On the fifteenth day, they said something different. It was the last show, the final act. Our last chance. That day's dare wouldn't take place at lunchtime at all, they said – nor in the field. Instead, after school, they would take us somewhere else. Somewhere unknown; somewhere unfamiliar. Somewhere that would prove our worth above and beyond everything. If it was conquered, we would win the Dare Game. We would be the heroes; _I_ would be the hero, finally. If we refused – well, we wouldn't.

You couldn't refuse a dare – not ever.

That evening, in the pitch-black of September's half-past nine, the game's rulers had threaded us through the streets of Shoreditch to the Totters Lane junkyard. It had hummed in the dark like something alive, velvet shadows crouching in the corners, wolfish shapes rising up out of the ground. The gate creaked and the gravel pricked and the air seemed to breathe.

It looked just like the London of my little-girlhood.

The fifteenth day's dare was to run right in. All the way around. It was the dare that would prove ourselves. It would prove our bravery, prove our fearlessness, prove our worth. Our heroism. It was the dare that would have rewritten me.

The fifteenth day's dare was to run right in. All the way around. Over the ground that stretched up claws; past the shadows that hid the world from view; through the darkness that swallowed everything up, closing off the small and safe and predictable. Closing off the fairytales.

The fifteenth day's dare was to run right in. All the way around. I ran right away instead, too terrified even to look back over my shoulder as the word they shouted rang in my ears like the tolling of a bell, scrawling the heroes out.

You couldn't refuse a dare – not ever.


End file.
